Maybe he means this. (I have to warn you though, I'm a bit tired so this might seem TOTALLY incoherent and OT)
Say someone slips you some Acid(LSD) and you don't know it and you suddenly see little pink flying trolls coming through the window.
Those darn trolls gang up on you and pee on you. You feel the warm liquid on your face. You smell it but wait, it smells like sweat. So were the trolls really there? You saw them right? And you felt their urine, but maybe it was sweat from the hot afternoon.

Because remember, its not the eyes that see or the ears that hear, its the brain. And the brain believes what it wants(which tends to get wacky with certain chemicals). But this IMHO has got to do with conscience perception and not physical reality.

Executive Member

I know, I know. I was only trying to understand what Xarog meant by verbalizing(typing) it out load. I think his point was that your senses are not fool proof.
Look at psychotics or the metally deranged. They are not drugged up(although they probably should be) but they still see and perceive things they experience as real that the rest of us don't.

But of course that doesn't make it real to the rest of us. So his point is sort of valid(Xarogs, not the psychotic). Senses are somewhat unreliable. But not statistically

Nope. I could theoretically hijack all the nerves going into your brain, excite the nerves (i.e. send electrical impulses) in the right way to make you see hear and smell the bus, and then excite your pain nerves at the right time so that you feel as if you'd hit the bus. If I did this, you'd have no way of knowing whether a bus really hit you.

Geriatrix said:

I know, I know. I was only trying to understand what Xarog meant by verbalizing(typing) it out load. I think his point was that your senses are not fool proof.
Look at psychotics or the metally deranged. They are not drugged up(although they probably should be) but they still see and perceive things they experience as real that the rest of us don't.

But of course that doesn't make it real to the rest of us. So his point is sort of valid. Sense are somewhat unreliable. But not statistically

Well as you say, senses are unreliable. How can you prove something using unreliable evidence? You can't. Science is only meaningful if there is a real world which it is measuring. Science assumes there is a real world out there, just as religion assumes that there is a God out there.

Executive Member

Yep, you probably can't say that something is absolutely true. But you can say something is statistically more accurate and plausible because of a shared perception of cause and effect.
But once again I want to stress that this has got to do with individual perception of reality. If a cup falls on the floor and no one perceives it falling, it still breaks. But if someone comes across the shattered cup, they add that sense driven piece of information to their personal perception of reality.
Anyhoo, night guys.

Expert Member

Some ppl are living in the matrix..... disprove that I am touching the keys on my keyboard. or looking at these posts on my monitor. Oh wait thats right you controlling the whole worlds synaptics so actualy the net does not exsist and niether do I.

Plausible but highly improbable.

If we just percieve that molecules exsist, going with your argument that science cannot prove it does then none of us exsist.

Executive Member

Lets look at the word subjective for a moment, because Xarog Like to throw it around:

sub·jec·tive
adj.
1.
a. Proceeding from or taking place in a person's mind rather than the external world: a subjective decision.
b. Particular to a given person; personal: subjective experience.
2. Moodily introspective.
3. Existing only in the mind; illusory.

You DO realise that each scientist is a different person, and each view the world through subjective perception, right? I mean really it's ridiculous. That's like saying murder can only be murder if you kill one person because the dictionary says that murder is to "kill a given person with premeditation".

More than that, how the hell do you know the scientists are really there in the first place? YOU'RE STILL ASSUMING YOUR SENSES ARE ACCURATELY REPORTING ON AN OBJECTIVE REALITY EVEN WHEN YOU TRY TO PROVE THAT YOUR SENSES ARE ACCURATELY REPORTING ON AN OBJECTIVE REALITY. In other words this is NOT logical. You cannot assume the very thing you are trying to prove to be true when you are trying to conclusively prove that it is true.

Correct. We may all be characters in some advanced game or simulation. But reality is as reality does; whether or not everything is real, it *behaves* exactly as if it is. So if our reality is not real, it's exactly as if it were, so we may as well treat it as real.

Honorary Master

Correct. We may all be characters in some advanced game or simulation. But reality is as reality does; whether or not everything is real, it *behaves* exactly as if it is. So if our reality is not real, it's exactly as if it were, so we may as well treat it as real.

This I will not agree to. By any standard, the existence or non-existence of God will affect our reality. It may not interfere with the laws of physics, but if that's all you're talking about then your definition is to narrow.